


The Voyage

by CaptainCrozier



Category: The Terror (TV 2018), The Terror - Dan Simmons
Genre: Afterlife, Death, Fix-It of Sorts, M/M, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-12
Updated: 2018-12-12
Packaged: 2019-09-17 01:55:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16965507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaptainCrozier/pseuds/CaptainCrozier
Summary: Francis wakes in a strange new world and is met by an old friend. Sometimes love runs out of time, but sometimes it is stronger than death.TV Canon Compliant stand alone fiction.





	The Voyage

**Author's Note:**

> This has been hanging about on my computer for a while completely unrelated to my other fics and written solely to make me feel a bit better about the TV show ending.

He remembered falling on the ice, the dull pain in his hips a sudden flare. He remembered the cries of the women and the sound of the sledge withering to nothing as it stopped ahead. He remembered fur clad arms lifting him upon it and the agony that followed. He remembered the roof of a hastily erected tent, draped in caribou skin and the low chant of an Esquimaux prayer.

And then he remembered nothing.

Francis Crozier stood alone within a wood and stared down at his feet upon the path. He noticed two things; that his boots were shined to mirrored black and that the forest floor was scattered with the muted golds and reds and browns of autumn. He glanced up, through the bare trees but he could not see the sky, only an opacity of white.

The pain was gone. Francis walked on without looking back, suddenly certain that there was nothing left behind him. All there had ever been for years was hard and brutal, the path ahead could be no worse.

The trail wound slowly, the crunch of twigs under his step, and as he moved a mist descended until he beheld a harbour, half shrouded in fog, and a ship, black bellied and stout, its three masts rising tall above and vanishing into the haze. He would know her anywhere, for ten full years he had trod her decks, and though he knew in truth she lay alone beneath the frozen ocean, she was here nonetheless, bright and clean and freshly painted. _Terror._ Her name did not seem to fit her peaceful repose upon the water.

Despite himself Crozier smiled to see an old friend. On her deck he watched shadows flit about her fittings, in the rigging, in the crow’s nest. Her ghosts were silent and ill-defined, but he guessed that he would know each of their names. Would they hate him now, he wondered, as he had spent these years in loathing of himself?

‘Hello Francis,’ the voice had come from nowhere and no whisper of movement had given warning of the presence of another. He started and looked up. ‘Well?’ the man said, his voice rich in the thin damp air, ‘Will you not greet me? It has been so very long.’

‘Christ! James!’

Francis felt arms around his back, the seize of hands at his shoulders and the feel of warm skin against his cheek. Shocked and delighted he drew back and gazed before him, his fingers still meshed in the wool of the commander’s uniform as if to let go would be to lose him forever. James smiled.

‘You took your merry time, did you not?’ he quipped.

‘I… what…?’

‘Not that it much matters,’ James explained, ‘Time has very little meaning here,’ and he glanced at the ship.

He was whole.  Not quite the James of old, nor the man he had seen die upon the ice. His skin was clear and pale and unmarked by neither time nor sickness. His eyes sparkled and there was a serenity to him now that Crozier did not recall, the bristle of his youthful pride tempered; the haughty air he sometimes adopted quite mellowed. He was not gaunt, he did not seem afraid, and there was no anguish in his features. The few lines that did remain upon his face crinkled with mischief and kindness, and he was handsome, so handsome. Francis reached his fingertips to his cheek without thinking and traced a line there, the flesh beneath firm and dry. He felt the dimple form beneath his thumb.

‘How’s the hand?’ James said beneath his touch. There was a playful glint to his eye.

Crozier stared at his left fist, rolling the fingers in and out and James raised an eyebrow merrily. Francis turned from him slightly and pronated his palm, utterly unable to stop looking at the limb he had lost two decades before.  ‘What in God’s name…?’ he muttered.

‘Quite,’ James chuckled, ‘Have you worked it out yet?’ he looked at him sideways, his pale profile strangely sharp against the black of _Terror_ ’s hull.

‘Am I dreaming?’ Francis said.

‘In a way,’ he watched James’ lips as they settled into a soft smile, yet there was a sorrow there, a melancholy wisdom. He rubbed an elegantly gloved hand over Francis’ shoulder, ‘That is what some Peoples call it, a long sleep.’

Crozier felt a chill pass through him. For a moment he could hear the low thrum of a chant and then it vanished as quickly as it came. His Esquimaux friends were praying over him even now, but his link to them was slipping, sliding into the fog around him.

‘Oh,’ he said quietly.

James watched him pleasantly. ‘It can be quite a shock, if you have not sensed it coming. I of course, had a little warning,’ he added wryly before his features fell again to something akin to pain, his pupils bare with honesty. ‘Thank you… for helping me.’

Francis held his eye. ‘I could not see you suffer James, nor ignore your pleas.’

‘You are a stronger man that I,’ James said quietly, ‘If roles had been reversed, I…’ he cleared his throat and wrapped an arm around Francis’ shoulder in a strange echo of his old bravado. ‘Anyway, how do you fare now?’

 ‘I thought I… I was not expecting this,’ Francis confessed.

James snorted. ‘Well… no,’ he agreed, ‘You probably thought you were indestructible after all you had survived.’

‘I fell….’ Crozier said weakly. It seemed a rather ignoble end.

‘Old age is a cruel mistress,’ James said, ‘A tumble upon the ice can be enough if you are already weakened in her grasp, but regardless of the cause the outcome remains the same. You come here, to this… waiting room of destiny.’

‘So that’s it?’ Francis said. ‘I’ve just…’

‘Died,’ James confirmed rather bluntly.

‘And _Terror_?’ he asked, blinking. ‘Why is she here? Am I not supposed to emerge white robed at pearly gates for judgement? Be sent on to heaven or hell depending on that decree?’

‘Well I suppose it is different for everyone,’ James mused, clearly entertained by the image, ‘What you see, where you go, but this…  It is fitting is it not?’

‘Some might think it rather cruel,’ Francis said, eying the vessel. If it was not for the ship he may well have died in a warm bed in England surrounded by offspring.

‘It depends on the how one views it…. You sailed away from all you knew upon her so long ago Francis, is it not right that now she take you back?’

‘Back where exactly? At the last she took me straight to hell…’

‘Oh Francis, that is not your fate, nor her intention now,’ James said kindly, ‘My sense is that she means only to take you home… Wherever home may lie.’

Crozier regarded her warily for a moment, as though she may give away her secrets any moment. His eyes trailed up the gangplank. He had no idea where he may travel, for he had never set down roots. Though he had subsisted well enough amongst the Esquimaux, his heart had never truly been there, but nor did it lie in England, or in Ireland. He had never married, he had no children or family, he had not seen his siblings in decades.

‘I don’t know where to go,’ he said sadly and felt James smooth his back.

‘It is not your decision,’ he assured, ‘It is already ordained. All you must do is step aboard and your voyage begins.’

‘Where did you end up?’ Francis said.

James looked at him as though he were a fool. ‘Well is that not obvious?’ he asked.

‘Not really, no! I can only assume you are sent to me now as some sort of guide, but for your soul, you are probably lounging in a London clubhouse entertaining the deceased ranks of the admiralty with your blasted stories for all eternity.’

James chuckled, his teeth white and strong within his jaw. ‘Not quite,’ he said.

‘Well where then?’

‘Here, I arrived here, just as you did, in a foggy wood a few moment’s walk from a harbour I did not recognise.  I must say, it’s not quite what I expected either. I thought maybe meadows and streams as some place idyllic or if patriotic, an English country garden, Regents Park? Or somewhere of notoriety and fame, a great exotic monument to beauty and achievement.’

Francis laughed despite himself for James’ vanity and sense of theatre appeared intact e’en in death.

‘But what do I get instead?’ James went on, sweeping an arm about him, ‘The bloody ship of doom herself anchored in a misty nameless port!’

The veneer of James’ melodramatic outrage cracked and his good humour shone below. His voice lost its dramatic edge. ‘Ah,’ he said gently, squeezing Francis close, ‘it is not ours to command, our destiny, our hearts will lead us to it, and we can broach no argument with them. So here I am.’

‘You’ve been hanging about In Ordinary all this while?’

‘If you like…. At least I have not yet embarked.’

‘Why ever not?’

‘Well, I could not very well go without you, could I?’ James said kindly, ‘A ship needs her Captain… and so do I.’

Francis looked at him in wonder. ‘James you have been gone twenty years! You have been alone all this time?’

‘Time has no meaning here, Francis, twenty years is but a heartbeat… or a millennium depending on perspective.’ Again, that sorrowful twitch to his lip.  ‘I was waiting,’ James said, ‘To take you home. And for that prize I would linger here as long as was necessary.’

Francis felt him slowly link his fingers with his. The tip of his thumb brushed gently back and forth over Crozier’s hand. He looked down at the intimate gesture, thought back to all the many times upon their final march that he had ached for such a touch and feared to seek it out. Feared judgement, feared rejection, and then it had all been too late.  Now James entwined their hands without a moment’s hesitation and for the first time since his arrival in the strange and silent harbour, for the first time in a lifetime now lost, Crozier felt as though he belonged, as though he was accepted. He looked at the ship, anchored before him in the vapours of the sea, her destination still unfixed but somehow bound to the man who stood beside him.  Where’er she travelled now, they would go together. They were as one, soul and body, and of all the myriad of heavens offered to each man at the point of his passing, this had been the choice of James’ heart.

And of his own, Francis thought, though he had long tried to deny it e’en to himself. Well, one could not argue with destiny, or with a truth such as this. An eternity chosen independently by two people for themselves, was an eternity agreed upon. A grin threatened to spill across his face and spotting it, James caught his bashful gap-toothed smile with his lips, pressing a confirmation, lingering, sweet and tender. It was a touch long overdue and cherished and Francis clung to him, unashamed.

'All right?' James breathed.

Francis nodded against him peacefully. The last of the old world left him and all that could be seen of the new was the warmth of James’ eyes. They twinkled happily before flicking briefly to the gangplank.

‘Shall we?’ he asked.

‘Lead on.'

‘Together,’ James corrected, tugging on his hand. ‘Our voyage begins together and, this time, has no end.’


End file.
